343 releases previously unreleased images from Halo 2 development

in the gloriole, “the sandbox” often refers to the weapons and vehicles on a map at any given time: all the toys you need to play with. But for a whole different set of gloriole Fans, this sandbox is the game itself. Be it forge or ambitious modding projects how SPV3, playing with the very core of the game itself is part of the franchise’s legacy. Now Microsoft has made this even easier after releasing a comprehensive collection of modding resources for Halo: The Master Chief Collection

Microsoft today published official documentation to the Halo: The Master Chief Collectionspecifically the mod tools from halo 2 and halo 3 (Other entries in the series are expected to be documented at a later date). As discovered by gloriole Mud Kiera on Twittersome of the documentation for halo 2 contains material direct from Bungie from the early 2000s. There are a few development pictures that only a few have seen so far.

The cool thing about these pictures is that they show the inner workings of halo 2‘s engine. One of these images illustrates the “screenshot_cubemapCommand. I won’t quite pretend to know what that does, but based on the documentation it serves to create reflective surfaces as we see in the old documentation photo provided.

Another nice pair of pictures shows up debugging informationwhich lists data when a model uses certain weapons or plays different animations.

Like many behind-the-scenes shots, these are hardly glamorous. But they’re still cool. The development of halo 2 is a tale of high ambition at the expense of abusive crunches that has been much openly talked about. Various materials from the game’s development have been previously seen, while others remain unattainable such as: legendary E3 demo from 2003 (which 343 finally thought about recently make playable). Today a little bit more saw the light of day.